Anything Engine Optimization The rolling record of the AI-search industry.

Reference

The Docket

The litigation and regulation on this record, case by case: the latest thing that happened, when, and the item it happened in. Courts and judges appear only as the record states them. The fuller running tally on this beat is kept by Chat GPT Is Eating the World, which is the source of most of these items; this page is the dated-ruling view of what the wire has published, and nothing it has not.

Dates ahead

Courts

CaseCourtLatest on the recordNextItems
Bartz v. Anthropic
Authors' class action over books used to train Claude; settled
not stated in the record; fee appeal is to the Ninth Circuit
  • — Class counsel put the first payout at $2,203.56 per work, on or before Nov. 15; consolidated statements went out Sept. 4 with a 30-day contest window. A second payment from a further $450 million is expected later.
  • — Settlement effective Aug. 20, the day after the appeal deadline passed; the two pending appeals challenge only attorneys' fee awards.
  • — Publishers' Coordination Counsel appealed the denial of its fee award to the Ninth Circuit; the payout schedule is unaffected.

First class payout, $2,203.56 per work, due on or before this date
Gilbert v. Anthropic
Author Daniel Gilbert, pro se after opting out of the Bartz class, over Hacking World of Warcraft
not stated in the record
  • — Anthropic opposed Gilbert's motion to dismiss its fair-use counterclaim, arguing his covenant not to sue over training copies does not moot it.
  • — Gilbert filed a covenant not to sue over training or purchased copies except those sourced from piracy, and moved to narrow the counterclaim.
  • — Anthropic's amended answer added a First Amendment defense alongside fair use.
Shakespeare v. Anthropic
Authors over training data; amended to name Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally
not stated in the record
  • — First Amended Complaint adds plaintiffs, a direct-infringement allegation against Amodei and a contributory claim against Amodei and Mann.
Sony Music Publishing v. Anthropic
Music publisher over training data: torrenting, contributory infringement against Amodei and Mann, CMI removal
N.D. Cal.; expected before Judge Eumi Lee, who has the Concord and BMG suits
  • — Filed Aug. 28; the 13th copyright suit against Anthropic on the tracker's count, mirroring Concord's second case and filed by the same firm.
Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War
Anthropic's First Amendment challenge to its designation as a supply-chain risk
Judge Rita Lin
  • — Summary judgment granted to Anthropic on the First Amendment claim; a preliminary injunction had issued earlier in the year.
Google v. SerpApi
DMCA anti-circumvention claims against a search-results scraper
N.D. Cal., Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers
  • — SerpApi moved to dismiss the First Amended Complaint.
  • — Google refiled, narrowed to Knowledge Panel images as the July ruling allowed.
  • — Most claims dismissed with prejudice July 20: SearchGuard protects ad revenue, not a copyrighted work; 21 days to replead.
Reddit v. Perplexity and SerpApi
DMCA anti-circumvention claims over scraping of Reddit content
S.D.N.Y.
  • — Perplexity raised a First Amendment defense, eight days after Anthropic did the same in Gilbert.
  • — Motions to dismiss denied; the suit proceeds — days after a different judge dismissed most of Google's near-identical claims against SerpApi.
Amazon v. Perplexity
CFAA claims over Perplexity's Comet agentic browser acting on Amazon.com
Ninth Circuit
  • — Preliminary injunction reversed: the Assistant acts on the user's direction, so Perplexity is unlikely to be the unauthorized accessor.
CNN v. Perplexity
Copyright claims over training inputs and outputs
not stated in the record
  • — Perplexity moved to dismiss Counts II–V — everything except the training-input claims.
Seattle Times and Newsday v. OpenAI and Microsoft
Copyright, DMCA and — a first on this record — Lanham Act trademark dilution over hallucinated content misattributed to the papers
S.D.N.Y., filed Sept. 4; to join the OpenAI MDL
  • — Filed; the complaint cites a roughly 47% fall in search referrals to mid-sized regional publishers from December 2024 to December 2025.
Sullivan et al. v. OpenAI
Textbook authors over training data
S.D.N.Y., filed Aug. 14
  • — Filed; the tracker counts it as the 132nd AI copyright case, echoing Sullivan v. Meta in the Northern District of California.
wikiHow v. OpenAI
Copyright over training inputs and query responses, vicarious infringement, DMCA CMI removal
not stated in the record
  • — Filed; the 24th copyright suit against OpenAI and the 137th AI copyright suit nationwide on the tracker's count.
Penske Media v. Google
Antitrust: search dominance used to obtain publisher content for AI Overviews without compensation
Judge Amit Mehta
  • — At the hearing on Google's motion to dismiss, Mehta called Google's use of publisher content in AI Overviews 'seems really unfair' and said product improvements 'are not immune from antitrust scrutiny'.
United States v. Google (search remedy appeal)
Appeal of Judge Mehta's six-year data-sharing and syndication remedy
D.C. Circuit
  • — Amicus brief filed Aug. 4 by Joel Thayer and Asad Ramzanali urging the court to strengthen, not narrow, the remedy, citing Google's 21% share of foundation-model API revenue.
In re Mosaic LLM Litigation (Databricks)
Five authors over training MPT and DBRX on their books
N.D. Cal., Judge Charles Breyer
  • — News/Media Alliance, the Association of American Publishers and STM filed a joint amicus brief Aug. 27 opposing summary judgment for Databricks.

Hearing before Judge Breyer on whether the case can be decided without a trial (summary judgment)
Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence
One of the earliest fair-use rulings against an AI company, on appeal
Third Circuit
  • — ROSS filed a Rule 28(j) letter pointing the panel to the Justice Department's Sept. 1 fair-use statement in the OpenAI MDL.
Gray v. Nadella et al.
Shareholder derivative suit over copyright-infringement risk at Microsoft — the third of its kind
W.D. Wash., filed Sept. 9; expected to consolidate before Judge Rothstein with Anderson and Gusinsky Trust
  • — Filed against Nadella, other directors and officers, and Microsoft itself.
American Federation of Musicians v. Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group
Union claims that the labels licensed recordings to Suno and Udio without paying contractual new-use fees
not stated in the record
  • — The union dropped Warner; claims against Universal continue.

Regulators and legislatures

ActorActionDateNextItems
European Commission Fined Alphabet €460 million under DMA Article 6(5) for self-preferencing nine Google services in search ranking and crawling; the decision excludes AI Overviews.
Approximate end of Google's 60-day window to end the practice
European Commission Designated ChatGPT a very large online search engine under the DSA — the third after Google Search and Bing, and the first non-traditional engine.
UK Competition and Markets Authority Ordered Google to give publishers an AI opt-out and attribution rights.
Alliance de la Presse d'Information Générale (France) Complaint to France's competition authority: AI Overviews, launched in France without publisher consent, breach the 2022 compensation agreement under which Google was fined €250 million in 2024.
U.S. Congress (bipartisan bill) A bill would require AI crawlers to identify themselves.

Rows last revised Sep 11, 2026. A row changes when a law-money item publishes; nothing here is updated on a schedule.